Why isn’t there a Pauline Kael of games reviewing?
- Esquire:Feature Story:The Lester Bangs of Video Games
I realize that many people write video-game reviews and that there are entire magazines and myriad Web sites devoted to this subject. But what these people are writing is not really criticism. Almost without exception, it’s consumer advice; it tells you what old game a new game resembles, and what the playing experience entails, and whether the game will be commercially successful. It’s expository information. As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside the game itself. There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing. There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing. And I’m starting to suspect there will never be that kind of authoritative critical voice within the world of video games, which is interesting for a lot of reasons.
This is a really, really interesting article. Expository followup at Gamespot with a longer interview with the author.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- A little more Olympics (bear with me, watch the bollards) (29 November 2006; score: 33.73%)
- Sudding Sudoku! How long can it go on? (answer: a few billion years more) (14 May 2005; score: 32.9%)
- My latest stories at the Guardian: Microsoft/Yahoo (doomed to fail!), hardcore games, Xbox problems and time travel (1 February 2008; score: 29.42%)
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July 28th, 2006 at 6:58 am
Maybe because elite video game designers don’t get laid as often as rock stars?
July 28th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Ben, explain your reasoning. Or do you not know who Pauline Kael was? She was the film critic of the New Yorker - incredibly influential. She wrote critiques of films, not the films themselves.
The point the article is making is that there’s nobody who does critiques of videogames that are at all comparable with those of film (or even, I’d say, music). Whether the makers get laid or not isn’t pertinent, really.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Hi - sorry if that last post looks a little puerile. I do know Pauline Kael and I have even slogged through some of her reviews, which I found pretentions in the extreme. The same goes for Lester Bangs, who may have been massively significant at the time but reads like total garbage now. Or has he would put it, carburettor dung.
So why do video games not attract a better class of critic? It’s a great question. I can think of three answers:
Wrongly IMHO, they’re not seen as high culture, but consumer goods. You don’t have ‘great’ washing machine critics either.
The process of producing video games isn’t as interesting as the process of making rock music or films. I’m sure it’s not just
lank haired young men designing troll armour to the sound of Whitesnake, but GTA wasn’t created by countercultural icons who guzzled drugs and groupies and redefined how a generation thinks of it self. At least, I really hope not.
Thirdly, video games are not an inherently literate medium. I tried playing World of Warcraft recently - no-one even talks in sentences.It’s like the Lord of Rings rewritten as text messages. The ’stories’ (if there are any) are basically strings of feeble cliches, to give a figleaf of meaning to the series of gruesome homicides that follows.
I guess that’s the point I was trying to make.
July 31st, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Hang on a tick - first of all it took 70 odd years of cinematic and intellectual refinement to create a breeding ground where Kael’s essays could take root. Video gaming has about another 50 years to go.
Secondly the reason there is no Pauline Kael of gaming is because there is no adequate language (yet) to provide a aesthetic critique of the form. Consider that talk of impact aesthetics and evaluating the Hollywood blockbuster has only really come on since 1999 / 2000 - arguably the closest form to the video game and you begin to see that in developing a vocabulary or even framework to evaluate a game such as GTA is incredibly tenuos. How do you evaluate mise-en-scene versus open ended game-play? How do you define characters or give them depth when they are just agents of striking visuals and plot? And what about intertextuality and pastiche - games reek of it which actually makes it harder to establish a ground zero language with which to evaluate the form.
And before I rant the avo away I am off to read the full article…
July 31st, 2006 at 5:18 pm
50 years before we get the Pauline Kael of videogames? Wow, that’s going to be a long and frustrating wait.
And, come on, cinema criticism was alive and well as an art form surely in the, what, 1970s? How long was Kael at it?… (quick Google) New Yorker film critic from 1967 to 1991. And I’d wager she didn’t build the edifice of film criticism entirely alone. What about Cahiers du Cinema which according to Wikipedia (crosses fingers behind back) “re-invented the basic tenets of film criticism and theory”.
Seems like videogames had better hurry it up a bit, especially given the hothouse media environment we now have.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Granted my maths is a bit out but the like of Cahiers and consequently Kael already had a big head start - examination and assessment of photographic composition and theatre had paved the way for discussion of cinema - there is no real similar precedent for vid games. Yopu cannot compare the PS2 Brando in The Godfather to the real thing.
And as for a likely Kael of the PS2 - I do think there are some likely critics - the name escapes me but one of the BFI Modern Classics books is on The Matrix and I recall a chapter on the edge of the construct - without returning to the book I would not want to go too far into the argument but essentially I thought at the time it presents a good way of understanding what a game presents you with at each turn. From a completely different corner there is VF Perkins’ Film as Film whereupon Perkins outlines you have to take a film on what it proposes to give you - and again I think this as a pretty solid way to understand the experience of a video game away form simply repeating the gameplay plot. One other route may be the likes of SFX criticism or those involved in digital art - this is way out of my area but it makes sense - just as painting criticism defines photogrpahy criticism (granted there are rebellions within that) it would make sense that digital art would provide some concepts for digital moving art but this is more a hunch than even a theory.
It would be typical of video games criticism to be a relection of video games themselves - very hybrid, drawn from hundreds of sources. Which raises the worrying idea that somewhere out there is an Adornho and Horkheimer of the video game ready to give us a real headache on the subject…http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
August 1st, 2006 at 11:14 am
Adorno would have abhorred the video game, just as he would have abhorred rock music and movies: He would probably argue that both act as obstacles to the proletariat becoming conscious of their condition, and encourage them to accept the economic status quo. He was after all a Marxist.
But that’s why they say, ‘Dead as Adorno’.
Final thought: If society needed an elite video games critic, wouldn’t it have produced one?
August 1st, 2006 at 12:26 pm
One random thought that occurred - surely it cannot be ONLY video games with no central criticism figure or pool of figures? Any other critic free spaces?
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:40 am
Re: Lester Bangs, Pauline Kael. Perhaps I’m missing a gene sequence fragment, but I could never really get into either of them. (Anyone for Derek Malcolm? . . . )
My tuppence worth: this is (partly) a gatekeeper problem. The majority of editors at mainstream broadcast and print outlets are 40+ — they belong to the last pre-game culture generation.
They’re not looking for the Kael Of Gaming. And if editors aren’t looking, great writers don’t get made. But Klosterman is also correct when he alludes to the games industry’s conservative nature (”absolutely everything is built around consumerism”).
I’m not a film criticism buff. But it strikes me that something needs to happen in the industry first — a Goddard, a New Wave, a challenge to safe commercialism — before a Bangs/Kael figure starts to reply with commentary on the industry couched in similar language.
Writer minus context = fish minus H20, right?
Peter
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
It occurred to me the other day that you have to have a situation where the readers will have the shared experience of the form being criticised. You have to have seen quite a few films before film criticism on its own makes much sense; that’s part of why you can’t tell kids their films are rubbish.
So Peter may have put his finger right on it: if not enough people, especially on the commissioning side, have played videogames, they won’t think their readers have.
Which raises the question of whether readers *have*, ands whether there is then a form of videogame criticism that would make sense to them in its Kael-ian (or Malcolmian) content.
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Is there space for such an indy / underground mentality within game development? Is it financially feasible? Can a guerilla (in the Spike Lee use of the term) mentality arise in video games too?
August 13th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
[A comment that got eaten by the spam filter while I was away - author: David Micallef]
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Crawford - take a look here http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/29/1051381948773.html
This is probably one of only a few examples where a computer game have been used for purposes other than simple player satisfaction.
The Australian game “Escape from Woomera” - based on illegal immigrants trying to escape from their detention centres, was released at the height of debate over government immigration policies. Plus points to the game makers for having the game partly funded by the same government it was designed to attack!
If anyone has any other examples I’d be interested to see them.
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August 14th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Cheers Charles - good spot. I recall there was a similar theme to the coverage around a games release as it was based on official , “real life” experiences inthe Gulf War, and there a few companies on the who make a virtue out of thier ties to realism - though none are as politically charged as this.
Interesting point in this coverage: “the project was also a reaction to the Federal Government policy of restricting media access to detention centres.” In light of the recent XBox news vis a vis consumer level game development tools and the “XBox YouTube” thing you have to think occasions like this should be on the increase as video games are used as virals and perhaps politically charged virals - a video game Nike sweatshop, SHAC doing an animal breakout game. All entirely likely and well within the realm of basic progamming skills. And all following the same creed of using video games to create publicity.
All that would remain is for it to be lottery funded…the Daily Mail headines on that would be hilarious: “Lotto funds gypsy car theft game”….
Though on a slightly more serious note, the idea of education via video games will be worth exploring…places like Shefield Hallam and Hull universities have dedicated eelctronic gaming courses and it may be interesting to see if any of these develop a public sector / public service aspect or remain firmly entrenched in the public sector
August 24th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
There isn’t that much to say about videogames. It’s as if all literature was pornography, designed to stimulate rather than enlighten or merely entertain: there can be good pornography, there can even be pornography that stands alongside non-pornography on various attributes, but 99 percent of it is just porn. All the stuff that makes literature worthwhile would just get in the way.
What’s it like playing a game? When I was a videogame reviewer (for the Indy, indeed), the correct answer to that was almost always “not very much”. Perhaps that’s different now; I haven’t really recovered from that experience so haven’t picked up a controller with intent for years. Although I did like Guitar Hero. Would Lester Bangsing that be cheating?
R
August 26th, 2006 at 7:38 am
Hmm. There are some games that it is like something to play. I am thinking in particular of the really big questy dungeon-type games, which, when I played, did have an atmosphere, and a sense, when you entered them, that there was a parallel life going on there. This is one of the pleasures of novel reading, though I don’t find it in films, and it doesn’t correlate particularly well with literary merit in novels.
But the little fragments I have seen of GTA just struck me as porno in both senses of the word. It may be that the only real difference is that gamers don’t have orgasms, and can thus go on frotting thier imaginations for hours.
February 19th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
It’s tricky to be Pauline Kael when you’ve got 140 words.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Only just noticed what an ancient thread this is. Still no Pauline Kael (or Bangs, or even Morley, Parsons or Burchill), though. Let alone an HST — worth 10 Kaels in my book.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:09 am
@Steve: true, but then people have written short stories in 6 - don’t forget “For sale, baby’s shoes, never worn.” Hemingway thought it his best.